Science & Tech

All Science & Tech

  • Is technology evil?

    A HubWeek panel exploring ethics in the digital world featured computer scientist and entrepreneur Rana el Kaliouby and Harvard Professor Danielle Allen.

    Rana el Kaliouby and Danielle Allen
  • Red flags rise on global warming and the seas

    The world’s oceans, glaciers, and ice caps are under assault by climate change. The Gazette spoke with former Obama science adviser John Holdren about the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report examining the threat.

    John Holdren
  • Tiny tweezers

    Using precisely focused lasers that act as “optical tweezers,” Harvard scientists have been able to capture and control individual ultracold molecules – the eventual building-blocks of a quantum computer – and study the collisions between them in more detail than ever before.

    optical tweezers in use
  • The shape-shifting of things to come

    What would it take to transform a flat sheet into a human face? How would the sheet need to grow and shrink to form eyes that are concave, a nose…

  • First video of viruses assembling

    For the first time, Harvard researchers have captured images of individual viruses forming, offering a real-time view into the kinetics of viral assembly.

    A type 3 poliovirus capsid coloured by chains
  • Innovating an innovation

    HubWeek fall festival takes place Oct. 1‒3 in Boston’s Seaport District.

    Hubweek event
  • Ending ‘dead zones’

    Harvard scientists are teaming up with sustainability officers and landscaping experts to test a new fertilizer that won’t wash into water supplies.

    Hands holding dirt
  • Up close and personal with neuronal networks

    Researchers from Harvard University have developed an electronic chip that can perform high-sensitivity intracellular recording from thousands of connected neurons simultaneously, allowing them to identify hundreds of synaptic connections.

    Neurons on device
  • The future of mind control

    A new paper explores why neuron-like implants could offer a better way to treat brain disorders, control prosthetics, or even enhance cognitive abilities.

    raditional-neural-electrodes-versus-mesh-electronics
  • Solve ocean’s troubles and climate change too?

    Experts from Harvard and beyond gathered Monday to discuss the oceans’ plight in a warming world, offering hopeful solutions despite the often bleak assessment prompted by warming, pollution, acidification, and coral bleaching.

  • Break it up

    Researchers at Harvard and Cornell have discovered exactly how a reactive copper-nitrene catalyst could transform a strong carbon-hydrogen bonds into a carbon-nitrogen bond, a valuable building block for chemical synthesis.

    Erving Professor of Chemistry Theodore A. Betley and graduate student Kurtis Carsch
  • A shot in the arm for vaccine research

    Immunology research at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard has advanced an HIV vaccine into the clinic, and will diversify thanks to a major gift from Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon.

    Group of students
  • A precise chemical fingerprint of the Amazon

    A group of researchers are using a drone-based chemical monitoring system to track the health of the Amazon in the face of global climate change and human-caused deforestation and burning.

    A drone flies over the amazon
  • Playing our song

    Samuel Mehr has long been interested in questions of what music is, how music works, and why music exists. To help find the answers, he’s created the Music Lab, an online, citizen-science project aimed at understanding not just how the human mind interprets music, but why music is a virtually ubiquitous feature of human societies.

  • A silly-sounding prize for some serious science

    Harvard-trained researchers win Golden Goose Awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  • An umbrella to combat warming

    Harvard’s Keutsch Research Group is working on a controversial idea that might someday be our best hope against climate change: stratospheric aerosol injection.

    Frank Keutsch stand is a thermal vacuum chamber
  • Life on the ice

    Harvard researchers describe life in the South Pole.

    Auroras as seen from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station..
  • A ‘Goldilocks zone’ for planet size

    Researchers have redefined the lower size limit for planets to maintain surface liquid water for long periods of time, extending the so-called habitable zone for small, low-gravity planets.

    moon Ganymede orbits the giant planet Jupi
  • A SWIFTer way to build organs

    A new technique called SWIFT (sacrificial writing into functional tissue) ultimately may be used therapeutically to repair and replace human organs with lab-grown versions containing patients’ own cells.

    SWIFT vascular channels
  • Lessons in learning

    Study shows students in ‘active learning’ classrooms learn more than they think

    two students looking at notebook together
  • Hunters, herders, companions: Breeding dogs has reordered their brains

    Erin Hecht, who joined the faculty in January, has published her first paper on our canine comrades in the Journal of Neuroscience, finding that different breeds have different brain organizations owing to human cultivation of specific traits.

    Researcher with two dogs
  • Fighting flora with fauna

    Scientists at the Arnold Arboretum are employing a species of predator moth to fight the invasive swallow-wort vine.

    Releasing moths
  • Pancreas on a chip

    Islet-on-a-chip technology allows clinicians to easily determine the therapeutic value of beta cells for any given patient.

    Islet on a chip
  • A gentle grip on gelatinous creatures

    To study jellyfish and other fragile marine life without damaging them, researchers developed ultra-soft underwater grippers that catch and release jellyfish without harm.

    Soft robotic grippers for jellyfish
  • Exposing how pancreatic cancer does its dirty work

    New research has found that pancreatic cancer actively destroys nearby blood vessels and replaces them with cancerous cells, blocking chemotherapy from reaching tumors. This insight could lead to new treatments that act by preventing cancer’s colonization of blood vessels.

    Pancreatic cancer cell
  • How a zebrafish model may hold a key to biology

    Martin Haesemeyer set out to build an artificial neural network that worked differently than fish’s brains, but what he got was a system that almost perfectly mimicked the zebrafish — and that could be a powerful tool for understanding biology.

    Researchers looking at zebrafish
  • Want to avoid climate-related disasters? Try moving

    For decades, the response to flooding and hurricanes was a vow to rebuild. A.R. Siders believes the time has come to consider managed retreat, or the practice of moving communities away from disaster-prone areas to safer lands.

    Storm surge hitting houses along coast.
  • Clever crows

    A new paper, co-authored by Dakota McCoy, a graduate student working in the lab of George Putnam Professor of Biology David Haig, suggests that, after using tools, crows were more optimistic.

    Crow with tool
  • Prospects clouded for finding life on the largest class of planets

    Led by Laura Kreidberg, a Clay Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, a new study shows that LHS 3844b, a terrestrial exoplanet orbiting a small sun 48.6 light-years away, has no detectable atmosphere

    planet is depicted as being largely covered with dark basalt plains.
  • How the moon came to be

    A fourth-year graduate student in the lab of Professor of Geochemistry Stein Jacobsen, Yaray Ku is working on a project aimed at understanding how the moon formed, and to do it, she’s working with actual lunar samples.

    Yaya Ku researches the moon